Btrfs
Ranked 2 of 10 filesystems by recommenders
A copy-on-write Linux filesystem built into the mainline kernel, recommended for instant snapshots, rollbacks and checksums; critics warn about RAID5/6, low free space and corruption stories.
A copy-on-write Linux filesystem built into the mainline kernel, recommended for instant snapshots, rollbacks and checksums; critics warn about RAID5/6, low free space and corruption stories.
195 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 105
- criticize it
- 90
- approval share
- 54%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 9 years
Median of the 15 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 105 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.1 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Snapshots, rollback and send/receive backups
“I can't count the amount of times i have wiped or edited something by mistake and then restored it within seconds with it.”
Comment from 2 Jun 2026 in “Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL” “I chose to use Limine and btrfs so now if it gets borked by a bad package install/uninstall I can roll back pretty easily.”
Comment from 1 Jan 2026 in “Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it” “You could use LVM or btrfs snapshots (at the filesystem level) if you're ok restarting your database between runs”
Comment from 23 Dec 2025 in “Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18” - Comment from 3 Jan 2026 in “The rsync algorithm (1996) [pdf]”
- Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “In Praise Of –Dry-Run”
- Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Time Machine-style Backups with rsync (2018)”
- Comment from 12 Mar 2026 in “I stopped using NixOS and went back to Arch Linux”
- Comment from 3 Sep 2026 in “Creating backup storage sucks”
- Comment from 15 Jul 2026 in “I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets”
Instant copy-on-write cloning
“like what has been readily available on Linux since like 2010 with btrfs and other Copy on Write filesystems”
Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating” “The entire "cloud" layer is Firecracker + Btrfs reflinks for instant copy-on-write cloning.”
Comment from 31 Jan 2026 in “Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native” “the resident Linux guru had set up "instant" staging environment databases with btrfs”
Comment from 23 Dec 2025 in “Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18” - Comment from 21 Oct 2026 in “LayerFS: A filesystem for AI coding agents”
- Comment from 5 Dec 2025 in “100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite”
In the mainline kernel everywhere
“I still use Btrfs because I know it is guaranteed to always be present on any Linux without any effort on my part.”
Comment from 19 Sep 2026 in “Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip” “I still use Btrfs because I know it is guaranteed to always be present on any Linux without any effort on my part”
Comment from 19 Sep 2026 in “Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip” “if one wants to stick with the official kernel without out-of-tree modules, btrfs is the only choice”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Case study: recovery of a corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool” - Comment from 19 Sep 2026 in “Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip”
Years of trouble-free use
“I haven't had troubles with the laptop FS in like fifteen years, and have never had troubles with the desktop or multipurpose box.”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Case study: recovery of a corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool” “Btrfs has gone a long way since then, and is even the standard filesystem for Synology NAS boxes.”
Comment from 27 Nov 2025 in “DIY NAS: 2026 Edition” “I've run BTRFS on my server (and external drive backups) for over 10 years without issues.”
Comment from 3 Jan 2026 in “2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop” - Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Ask HN: How Reliable Is Btrfs?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Ongoing corruption and data-loss stories
“An FS that will not eat (all) your data upon a hard powercycle only at the cost of 14 custom C tools is a hard pass from me”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Case study: recovery of a corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool” “BTRFS appears to be the exception, as the stories about corruption events do not seem to diminish in time.”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Case study: recovery of a corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool” “I've never had a BTRFS fs that didn't spontaneously combust before it would have been decommissioned.”
Comment from 28 Nov 2025 in “DIY NAS: 2026 Edition” - Comment from 3 Jan 2026 in “2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop”
- Comment from 30 Aug 2026 in “FreeCORE TrueNAS Core – Continued”
RAID5/6 is risky
“as soon as you want to do RAID1+0 or RAID5/6 you’re entering dangerous territory with BTRFS”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Case study: recovery of a corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool” “Changing the metadata profile to at least raid1 is a good idea, especially for anyone, against recommendations, using raid5 or raid6 for a btrfs array”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Case study: recovery of a corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool” “They also fucked up their parity RAID repair so that the next disk failure on a different disk will destroy the data”
Comment from 16 Sep 2026 in “GEFS on OpenBSD: A Early Preview” Trouble when free space runs low
“it took me longer to run out of space, but I of course ended up running out of space”
Comment from 18 Oct 2026 in “Codex Desktop continuously generates Crashpad pending dumps” “The disk full scenario is greatly improved. Still buggy, but it is recoverable.”
Comment from 21 Aug 2026 in “Linux 7.2 Released” “It still has an issue with getting stuck in a bad state if you let the free space drop too low”
Comment from 16 Sep 2026 in “GEFS on OpenBSD: A Early Preview” Degraded mode and failed mirrors
“you sure need to be educated on BTRFS to use it in fail scenarios like degraded mode”
Comment from 9 Mar 2026 in “My Homelab Setup” “it isn't going to let you know when you have a mirror fail until you try to boot it and it won't come up”
Comment from 21 Oct 2026 in “LayerFS: A filesystem for AI coding agents” “Would be cool if it was finally production ready, and actually reliable on degraded hardware.”
Comment from 30 Aug 2026 in “FreeCORE TrueNAS Core – Continued”
Other filesystems people recommend
The four most recommended other filesystems, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 10 filesystems, rankedWhat people said
40 of the 234 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the btrfs snapshot is going to mean each workspace is a proportionally a tiny delta”
“it isn't going to let you know when you have a mirror fail until you try to boot it and it won't come up”
“it took me longer to run out of space, but I of course ended up running out of space”
“I know it is guaranteed to always be present on any Linux without any effort on my part.”
“ZFS and btrfs were designed from the start to handle this, by using checksums on every piece of (meta)data and redundancy”
“I still use Btrfs because I know it is guaranteed to always be present on any Linux without any effort on my part.”
“I still use Btrfs because I know it is guaranteed to always be present on any Linux without any effort on my part”
“It still has an issue with getting stuck in a bad state if you let the free space drop too low”
“They also fucked up their parity RAID repair so that the next disk failure on a different disk will destroy the data”
“it's better to use ZFS or Btrfs and native filesystem snapshots, since they're atomic”
“Would be cool if it was finally production ready, and actually reliable on degraded hardware.”
“The disk full scenario is greatly improved. Still buggy, but it is recoverable.”
“I then made the guest root directory a BTRFS subvolume, so that I can snapshot it.”
“My N100 two-disk btrfs-raid1 NAS hits line rate on a 2.5G NIC, that's all that matters to me.”
“I can't count the amount of times i have wiped or edited something by mistake and then restored it within seconds with it.”
“I'd worry about file create, write, then fsync performance with btrfs, but not about reliability or data-loss.”
“You don’t see ZFS/BTRFS block based snapshot replication choking on git or any sort of dataset.”
“I haven't had troubles with the laptop FS in like fifteen years, and have never had troubles with the desktop or multipurpose box.”
“BTRFS appears to be the exception, as the stories about corruption events do not seem to diminish in time.”
“as soon as you want to do RAID1+0 or RAID5/6 you’re entering dangerous territory with BTRFS”
“Changing the metadata profile to at least raid1 is a good idea, especially for anyone, against recommendations, using raid5 or raid6 for a btrfs array”
“if one wants to stick with the official kernel without out-of-tree modules, btrfs is the only choice”
“An FS that will not eat (all) your data upon a hard powercycle only at the cost of 14 custom C tools is a hard pass from me”
“like what has been readily available on Linux since like 2010 with btrfs and other Copy on Write filesystems”
“you can simply use a filesystem with snapshots like btrfs or ZFS and gain the same resilience”
“you sure need to be educated on BTRFS to use it in fail scenarios like degraded mode”
“Most NAS manufacturers have been using Btrfs for many years, so it's reliable enough.”
“its snapshot + send/receive functionality are all you need for convenient and efficient backups”
“With modern filesystems like zfs or btrfs, you can take a full snapshot every minute and keep it for a while”
“The entire "cloud" layer is Firecracker + Btrfs reflinks for instant copy-on-write cloning.”
“you'd probably use the snapshot feature of a filesystem like btrfs or zfs instead of hardlinks for deduplication”
“I've run BTRFS on my server (and external drive backups) for over 10 years without issues.”
“BTRFS is certainly adventurous. That's one way to make sure you have a good backup policy in place.”
“I chose to use Limine and btrfs so now if it gets borked by a bad package install/uninstall I can roll back pretty easily.”
“the resident Linux guru had set up "instant" staging environment databases with btrfs”
“You could use LVM or btrfs snapshots (at the filesystem level) if you're ok restarting your database between runs”
“It makes sense for a COW snapshot to be faster than copying the whole database.”
“I've never had a BTRFS fs that didn't spontaneously combust before it would have been decommissioned.”
“Btrfs has gone a long way since then, and is even the standard filesystem for Synology NAS boxes.”
“I've also had a weird experience where a btrfs filesystem formatted on my desktop PC was not mountable on a Raspberry Pi”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.